Man, I was all set to do a joke update today, sketched out the art and everything. And then, about 3 weeks back, our four month old daughter who used to sleep through til morning began waking once or twice during the night. (I feel sucker punched, here.)*

Sigh.

I really enjoy April Fool’s, look forward to smirking through out the day (example, our IT guy announced a way to reduce costs and energy usage through limited email access: Last names starting A through M will have email access 6:30 AM through 1:00 PM. Last names starting N through Z will have email access 1:00 PM through 7:30 PM.) And I was totally stoked that this year’s was on a Wednesday, my regular update day. But between the day job, freelance, baby care** and the 5 hours of sleep per night AND baby’s first shoulder dislocation this past Friday AND AND a sudden computer upgrade… just not meant to be. Not with me enjoying it, which is the whole point.

I was contemplating going with a simple “screw comics” post, but I already did that and caused unintended heartburn for some folks. And I don’t think I’m in the right mental space to pull that off, all things considered.

And I told Patrick I got this week so no update from him either, I’m afraid. Entertainingly enough, my original April Fool’s prank was to present a slick, hyper stylized, action and boob packed comic as Dicebox’s new direction. Kinda redundant now.

As penance, and a way to rev back up into Dicebox as I complete other obligations*** I will be attempting to post something in the Dicebox Process Journal at least six times a week for the month of April. I will start tonight with a one of the cleaned up and colorized sketches. And this weekend I’ll share some concept art for Book 2 that I was originally planning to share today a balm for goofiness.

Oh, and updates to Dicebox here on out: Patrick and I will be alternating every other week until he’s finished, allowing me time to ramp up fully as well for hime to wrap up this epic. And they’ll be truly Wednesday updates again! With as much material as we can manage in two weeks time.

See you on April 15th with the beginning of Dicebox Book 1: Part 9: Out of a Molehill. No fooling.

*What she really wants is to sleep in the bed with Kip and me, something I gave her a taste for when traveling–hated the crib arrangement, room temperature and we were in a king sized bed. It’s also part of her biggest growth spurt yet, not just size but mental activity and physical ability. And it’s the fact that she can now roll and hoist herself along and over things that has me firmly vetoing her sharing the bed with us. Which means a good couple of hours every night getting her to settle and go back to sleep. In her own bed/bassinet.

**By which I mean breast feeding. I produce at least a quart everyday for our little monkey girl and, man, what a time consuming, exhausting enterprise that is. Looking forward to weaning, tantrums and all. I’ve seen it compared to a part time job, seven days a week and boy they’re not kidding.

***And wean the Kid.

There has been some rants and inspired responses (also not work safe), but I think what gets to me is the fact that it’s statistically inaccurate. Statistically speaking that should be a guy humping his iMac.

I mean, I know why this was the most, uh, natural choice for the artist and editors. I mean beyond the whole object and objectifier debate. I don’t even think it’s all about the “male gaze.” No, it’s that in the heart of every male, there reposes a drag queen. (The fishnets gave it away.)

Many cartoonists are joining the fray, including a few of the Girlamatic artists–editor Lea Hernandez has set up a LiveJournal for the sole purpose of documenting the progress of any and all Girlamatic artists participating in this event.

Which won’t include me. Why? Cause I’ve done a 24 Hour Comic and once is enough. Pity I had to do three of the damn things before actually completing one within 24 hours.

But even more exciting for me is the 24 Hour Comic anthology that just came out, because it includes a story from Paul Winkler, who was part of that Old Comics Making gang of mine. Yay Paul!

I took part in two 24 Hour Comic jams with Paul, which I talk about a bit in a post here. And actually, Paul is going to be doing his fifth 24 Hour Comic this Saturday at Jim Hanley’s Universe, I believe.

Actualy, Paul was kind enough to post some advise to in order to successfully complete a 24 Hour Comic to the Zwol forums:

I figured that since I’ve done four 24-hour comics over the years, and got 2 of them done in under 24 hours (and went way over with the other two), I might give a few words of curmudgeonly advice to the first-timers:

Try a simpler style than you’re used to.
Being cartoony is not only fun, it can be a lot faster. Take liberties.

Beware of heavy dialogue.
Lettering is slow, especially if your lettering is as bad as mine. On the other hand, lettering may be faster than drawing something complicated. Do one or the other, rarely both.

Shading is for people who have time.
Gray is for wimps!

Do you really need that background?
Get in the habit of thinking about it again for every panel.

Use really fast tools.
No muss, no fuss. Inflexible markers are good. Brush markers are tricky when you’re exhausted, and they dry slow. Real ink is for people who have time. Big fat markers are your friend. They prevent you from getting finicky.

Is the drawing vaguely legible? Great! Move on!
You can come back to it later. If there is no later – oh well, good thing you stopped when you did.

Go twice as fast as you think is necessary.
You might think, “I do an average of 6 panels a page. I need to do a page an hour. Therefore I have 10 minutes per panel.” Nope! Something will slow you down. In fact, many somethings will slow you down. You can’t predict or prevent them all. If you are just barely keeping up with where you need to be, you will suddenly find yourself way behind and it will only get worse. I did that on two of my 24-hour comics. They both went way overtime. It hurts your morale too, makes it harder to get all the way to the end.
The solution is to get ahead and stay ahead. Think you need 10 minutes a panel? Make it five.

Let things happen.
You may find that in your rush, and your increasingly tired state, you start drawing differently, or thinking differently, or seeing differently. Don’t fight it. Be willing to go places you’ve never been, and don’t try to force the direction! You’re not making a magnum opus, you’re participating in an experimental artistic process. Something interesting will come, and it will probably not be much like what you envisioned when you started.

All good advice.

For the curious, here’s a link to the first 24 hour comic, Scott McCloud’s A Day’s Work.

And, what the heck, a couple more: Kip’s second 24 Hour Comics, The Star, and one done by Barry Deutsch, Filling the Hole.

And speaking of Barry we’ll be joining me on Girlamatic with his new narrative series, Hereville come May 6th! As he is another of the Old Gang, imagine my delight at that!

It’s basically a compare and contrast of the language and attitude of the Gillette Company’s marketing of safety razors for women as opposed to men. Here’s great example of that difference is given by Hoffmann in her column:

On the “Experience Venus” page, I learned about how Venus can give me “oh-so-touchable legs.” And I got the inside scoop on some features special to the Venus system, including the super-simple blade-change function—“No fiddling. No mistakes. Blade-changing made simple. Click. That’s it. Just open the refill and click on the handle. You couldn’t do it upside down if you tried. Phew.”

Phew indeed. The MACH3 site’s version? “Open cartridge architecture makes rinsing and cleaning the MACH3Turbo blades easier than ever; the single-point docking system … makes it virtually impossible for consumers to accidentally load a cartridge upside down.” Architecture? Docking system? Thank goodness they didn’t try those 50-cent words on the girlies.

All this dredged up memories for some research I did for a column I wrote for Anodyne about hair as gender signifier. Specifically, an 1991 article by Susan Basow “The Hairless Ideal: Women and their Body Hair” and the role that the Gillette Company played in popularizing the shaving of female skin back in the 1920s.

The following is a quote by Susan Basow from a post she made to a Women’s Study List in 1995, which sums up :

In my research, I found that in the U.S., prior to 1915, very few women removed underarm or leg hair. Then Gillette began “The Great Underarm Campaign” to get women to shave with their new safety razor. The ads emphasized “smoothing” the underarms and had a racist tone (to make skin “white” and “fashionable” at a time when waves of “dirty” “old-fashioned” immigrants from Eastern Europe, Italy and Ireland were flooding the U.S.). In the 1920s, the female “look” was a boyish and youthful one (the flapper), but this is also when women had won the vote and were leaving the domestic sphere for the public one. Ads emphasized the importance for women to manage their appearance in order to be sexually attractive to men. Leg shaving didn’t become popular til the 1940s, and coincided with the shortage of silk stockings due to the war (and the consequent bare-legged look). Ads emphasized attractiveness, neatness, cleanliness, and modernity. Given that women were behaving more like men (in terms of jobs and education), the gender lines became drawn on women’s bodies: men are hairy, therefore women must be hairless. Legs, leading as they do to the crotch, also have a sexual association. Shaving them can be viewed as a means to socially control (modify) women’s untamed sexuality.

Basow also surveyed 420 women on their personal and cultural attitudes on hair removal among women:

The major reasons for starting were because “it was the thing to do.” The major reasons for continuing were because it makes women feel “feminine” and sexually attractive.

I admit it, I do shave—very irregularly, mostly on what can only be described as a whim, sometimes for a grooming effect. I still find it amusing that some people identify feminists by their hairy legs, as if hat was a side effect of a condition. Ah, if only it were that simple—don’t shave your legs and you have instant enlightenment on a philosophical belief system.

I have to say, the Gillette ads have always annoyed me, even without probing very deeply into their “culture.” On the whole, I was much more impressed by the blades in The Seven Samurai—a movie which I just saw for the first time tonight.

Ever since Kip and Barry posted pieces they had originally written for Anodyne, I’ve been thinking of doing the same. Kip posted his wonderful article entitled “Why You Don’t Read Comics” while Barry posted on his experiences on being a cross dressing duck. Actually, I used to share S&G editing and column writing duties with Barry.

What follows is the first column I did solo, probably not my best piece, but I still like it. And I think it goes some ways in explaining why Colymbosathon ecplecticos amuses me so. As with most magazine pieces, I had to cut some verbiage to make it fit, but that draft is lost on some crashed hard drive. In attempt to be true to a piece of published writing I did six years ago, the only alterations I’ve made was to fix some tenses and articles that suffered from last minute cuts made by editors who had been up for 30 hours at that point, though I did include a couple of footnotes in an attempt to fill in some of the blanks.

I also had to gray out the clip art I had picked to accompany the piece behind the text, originally done by Paul Goold for Life magazine before being collected by Dover Publications:

The Other Fish in the Sea

Mermaids (after a fashion)

…fashion went to final extremes in the mid twentieth revival…nearly nude top and very shrouded bottom…It corresponds to one very tenacious myth about women, the same one that gave rise to the image of the mermaid, the perniciously divided female monster, a creature inherited by the gods only down to the girdle… the upper half of woman offers both keen pleasure and a sort of illusion of sweet safety; but it is a trap. Below, under the foam, the swirling waves of lovely skirt, her hidden body repels, its shapeliness armed in scaly refusal, its oceanic interior stinking of uncleanness.

—Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits

I’ve recently found out something startling about the seahorse. I’m not talking about scientists erroneously supposing that the male seahorse was more docile than the female just because he carries the eggs. (I was a bit puzzled by that assumption. After all, the male seahorse is also the sperm carrier, supposedly possessing all those neat chemicals that make him a he. Hormones were considered the big key to aggression for quite a while.) Nor do I mean the discovery that the male doesn’t carry a placenta-like substance to nourish the eggs that are deposited in his incubator pouch. No, the shocker for me was the revelation that the male seahorse was key to the feminist debate over the division of labor between women and men.

“It was thought that they did all the rearing of the young, but it turns out that the females do most of the work,” was the tag line accompanying the New York Times Service article by Natalie Angier—one of the most interesting pieces of sensationalist journalism I’ve come across in a long while. The article, carried in the October 29th [1997] edition of the Oregonian, covered the results of a study by Heather Masonjones, Of Amherst College, focusing on the dwarf seahorse, one of 35 species of seahorses to be found in the world. Provocative headlines aside, the truth is neither parent puts any effort in to the actual rearing of the children.

As for the breeding, the female does indeed put enormous effort into producing hundreds of fertile eggs. This done, she indicates her condition by nodding her head to likely male candidates. After she has found the one she wants to hold tails with for a turn around the sea floor, she inserts a special nipple into an opening in the male’s pouch, deposits her eggs, and then swims off until next season. The male, meanwhile, discretely fertilizes the eggs inside his pouch, incubates them for about ten days, then spends several painful hours “giving birth” to hundreds of offspring. Which seems like a mighty amount of effort on the male’s past, whether her eggs or his non-existent “placenta” provides the nutrients for the embryos.

Let’s go back to how these new findings “demonstrates once again the dangers of making simplistic assumptions about the reproductive behavior and the ever-shifting dialectic between male and female.” Well, I never recalled how the male seahorse had “long been viewed with awe, as a kind of submarine saint.” It is odd how I‘ve always seemed to know that the male seahorse “bore” the young. But I remember it being presented as an oddity of nature—not a shining example of manhood—right along with the bower bird, who takes months building a color coordinated nest for his potential mate’s approval, and the fact that earthworms are hermaphrodites.

But, just to see if I missed something, I checked out a few popular animal biology books from the public library with references on seahorse breeding from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Contrary to Angier’s claims, the female was not forgotten; her unique role was well noted by the authors. True, they did dwell more on the uniqueness of the male, but none painted him as “a martyr to his children.” In fact, it was mentioned that he’d often scarf a few of his own newborn offspring as an after-birth snack. Then he swims off, leaving the remainder to fend for themselves.

Now, the male stickleback fish actually cares more for his kids—though he doesn’t actually carry the eggs, he does tend to them in the nest he built, guarding them till they hatch and then watching over his brood until they can actually take care of themselves. All without the help of the female , who he will actually chase away after she lays her eggs. there are also examples of female fish who go to great lengths for their young, but the most popular way fish go about reproduction is for the female to lay her eggs, the male to fertilize them and both to leave the scene without a second thought.

But why are we looking for parenting role models here at all? When all is said and done, these are fish. You know, creatures dumb enough to be caught with a line, a hook and some bait? I find it amazing that people still try to justify the social order between men and women by citing examples of nature. As for biological differences, well, yeah, in many species the male is bigger and better armed. Many are also covered in fur, shuffle along on four legs and piss in order to define their personal space. Another tout of male superiority in the animal kingdom is the finer plumage of male birds. Which is to say they wear the equivalent of lipstick and high heels, engage in elaborate dances hoping to capture the heart of some female who didn’t appreciate all the effort he put into looking nice for her. It’s all rather ridiculous, but then people have always needed to give everything around them human personas, like Father Time and Mother Nature.*

To be fair, people also assign their fellow humans animal characteristics; that one has a heart like a lion, this one struts like a peacock, lawyers are vultures, women are fish.

I’m not sure how many people are aware of the insult of “fish” for women, which was especially prevalent among the gay male community I knew a few years ago. It’s a term of a rather indelicate origin; however, the comparison between women and fish is quite an old one, much older than the derogatory connotation used today. It was partly due to the prevailing belief that women were cold and clammy (as opposed to a man’s dry heat). There is also the concept as fish as Other, a strange creature from a world totally unlike our own, down to the substance they breathe, Ancient mythology is full of mermaids, sirens, river maidens and ladies in lakes.** This concept found its way into the poetry and prose of the Renaissance (and beyond) with analogies to the sea and other nautical references.

Despite all this, I feel no kinship to fish. And while I find some of their variations and answers to the problems of life interesting, I have no desire to emulate them or look to them as examples of a better life. not that I’m against giving eggs to my husband for him to incubate and bring to term. I hear that the Rockefeller Foundation will give us a million bucks if we succeed…

*Chronos and Gaia.

**I realize there are also plenty of watery males, I was tracing a particular heritage of Western thought. Plus the females did seem the dominate ones, the ones with the most screen time, especially in being part fish. Males tended to be the river itself or fully human in appearance, and not so often carved in statuary.

Can you guess what they got excited about with this fine specimen? As they made no mention of the oldest vagina, one must assume they were all carefree and gay back then.

I’m sure most of the spammers who hit me would’ve been disappointed to hear these experts proclaim that his “copulatory organ is large and stout.� Pity they didn’t conclusively find a female and report on the condition of her, ah, lips.

It just all seems old hat to me. Though long part of fan and geek culture, I hardly was in the thick of it—yet I knew of slash fanfic for over ten years now. I mean, Becca’s journal directed me to a Globe and Mail article several months ago about slash fiction entitled “If Frodo Loved Bilbo” (though, really, shouldn’t it be If Samwise Loved Frodo…?). And there is a very good book about fanfic that was put out in the mid-90s called Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins that I read a long many years ago, which I was a bit disappointed that Thrupkaew didn’t even mention in her article.

Not that the whole thing isn’t still worth discussing, I just want articles that aren’t mostly “hey, look at what people are doing!” I know that there has been a huge boom of slash fiction with the widespread use of the internet—but even that was a few years ago. Still, I found the Bitch article interesting enough. Thrupkaew took a nice approach in trying to understand the appeal of writing slash by speculating on what type she would write.

Thrupkaew also got at what I believe is the appeal for hot man-on-man action for some women: not the fact it’s safe to fantasise about men or that male sexual desire is the dominant paradigm, but that it is an erotic experience women can’t experience firsthand, and so there is large appeal to explore on the dynamic. I would even go further to say that if you primarily like boys in your bed, than why not two for the price of one? And, as she points out, there is the fact that the most developed characters on any given TV show tend to be male, that’s it’s rare to find one, let alone two fully realized female characters to admire and latch on to. Notable exceptions being the Joss Whedon family (Buffy, Angel, Firefly) and to some extant other SciFi shows such as Farscape and Star Trek: DS9. And, of course, there is Xena and La Femme Nikita.

Though not a huge follower, I like slash and fanfic, or, as I really haven’t read that much, I like the fact that it exists. I think it makes perfect sense and really the creators of these shows (and book and comics) should be flattered and pleased that people are doing this. It means they suceeded, that their stories have gotten under their audience’s skin and are part of their personal mythos, if only for a little while. Heck, my friends and I will do this in a mild way when discussing a show we all watch—not go as far as plotting whole scenarios, but musing on a characters motivation, their next possible action, how they interact with the other characters and so on.

It’s not unusual for me to graze slash sites. Like I said I’m not a big reader of the stuff; I’ve probably only read about ten all the way through—and a couple were actually well-written, with appealing scenarios. But I am endlessly fascinated by the pairings people come up with and the devices they use to orchestrate their bed romps. My favorite actual fanfic pairing is Joxer/Ares, God of War. My favorite speculative pair is Statler/Waldorf—you know, the hecklers from the Muppet Show. I know David Chess has gotten searches for Jellicle Cat Slash—which just boggles the mind. And then there are the places I just don’t wanna go—like Bill Gates/Steve Jobs.

Probably the most wretched turn fanfic can take is the “Mary Sue” syndrome, something that Thrupkaew does touch upon. This is when the writer none-too-subtly interjects her- or himself as a character in the story they write, usually as a powerful peer of the main hero. Mary Sue is actually a fairly recent term for me (though Kip swears it was mentioned in Textual Poachers. I knew of the concept, though, and it always makes me squirm in pitying embarrassment. I just knew them as twinks, or practioners of tiny sex.

I first encountered the term Mary Sue in Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog, Making Light, in the entry “Marching Mary Sues” (everything is better when it’s marching, even moreso when it’s a calvacade) It’s a great entry—beyond directing me to the MaggieFic’s Handy-Dandy Mary Sue Generator, it has one of my favorite lines ever: “If this power could be used for good, it wouldn’t be this power.” It also references the comment section of an earlier post that not only supplies one with the search phrases to turn up gobs of fan fic, but has a hysterical account of a Mary Sue at Hogwart’s.

I found the Mary Sue Generator fun, though I did misunderstand the intent at first; I just charged right in without reading the instructions. There are attributes and then blank word fields—I thought one entered the various attributes and then a little story would be genrated—a limited one, like Mad-Libs or They Fight Crime. But you actually just generate the attributes of your Mary Sue, which is actually entertaining enough—especially since I could get results very close to what I first hand-entered: Emerald eyes, raven tresses, an intrguing scar as opposed to a clever scar, though the closest I could get to “empathy out the ying-yang” was plain “empathy.” I have to say I didn’t know “Heiress” was an occupation and I was amused by the newly revealed relationship to a major character “Madame Hooch‘s Shady Ex-Lover”—but I actually decided to go with “Han Solo’s Catholic School Classmate.”

Under Sex I would include the urge to masturbate, which I see as being different than the urge to copulate, and with Sleep I would include the idea of leisure, the need to be lazy or inactive. In exploring these concepts, I am unconcerned with bodily functions (such as breathing or voiding), emotions, or spiritual aspirations. I am simply interested in the physical drives that more or less we base our lives and culture around.

The drive to make money or amass riches? Well, in it’s purest form, it’s a way to secure better, bigger, more sex, food and leisure. I am as interested in the demented impulse to acquire money for its own sake as I am in underwater-scatalogical-kiddie-barnyard-animal porn.

Given my interest in trickster figures, these are aspects that I have been given reason to think about often, as your basic trickster indulges in them to excess, usually to comic effect. And this is what I see reflected in many of the most popular of the American TV sitcoms such as Friends, Scrubs, and so on. The main cast of most of these shows are picked from very specific groups—no matter how hip or modern they have been upgraded to be—and then painted in broad, fantastical strokes: They are New Yorkers (gypsies, bohemians, not mainstream) Hospital Staff (Soap Opera fodder, pantheon of gods [doctors] and nymphs [sigh, yeah, the nurses]) Gangsters, College and High School students and those that stand between us and the End of the World. The border groups, those on a threshold. Not normal. Not us.

So let’s begin. Instead of saving the “best” for last, let me begin with what began it:

Sex

Okay, let me just get this out of the way. Though I sympathize with Barry’s emotional reaction, let me just state I disagree with his general premise. Sorry: in my experience, people in the real world who base their lives around sex after their early twenties are looked on with as much derision as those who have none. Phoebe Buffay on Friends would be classified as a nymphomaniac who endangers herself daily and should be urged to seek help, if not be ostracized. As for Joey Tribbiani, well, no one would take him seriously—hmmm, actually, kinda like on Friends.

The fact is, this is not the real world nor does anybody I know take it as such. The main characters on these shows have insanely easy access to sex, as they do to real nice apartments, up-to-the-minute wardrobes and expensive gadgets. And a more than fair portion of each thirty minute episode is dedicated to sex humor, because sex is an easy hook and easy to make fun of because it is a point of vulnerability. But Hollywood overrates the time and effort that sex, or thoughts of sex, take up in our daily lives.

I actually find that premise easy to dismiss. What burns my cookies is the idea that love equals sex, like, say, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the second season, when Angel, the vampire-with-a-soul, experienced true happiness, it wasn’t from the realization that he loved Buffy and Buffy loved him. Oh no. It’s when they had sex that his soul pops out. Gah… (Really, that makes Angel a bit of a girl that way—true acceptance through sexual encounter.)

I could go on and on about the unrealistic and unattainable sexual ideal for women on TV and in the movies (often conflicting, Ice Princess vs. Slut), but what about the men? Despite what Hollywood would have us think, they are not always ready to go. They can be, very specifically, not in the mood. Thank God. How annoying would it be, walking down the street with someone who is always this close to an erection?

Then there’s the sexual intolerance, actually, specifically, towards masturbation, which is not respected in its own right. Only those who can’t get any resort to masturbation, right? Well, no, not for me, and quite a few others I know. I like sex with another, I like masturbating, and the urge for both is quite distinct.

I actually find masturbation jokes irritating in an embarrassing kind of way. A sort of swaggering “oh, yeah, I can get It any time I want, so let me prove it in a slam against the losers who can’t” kind of way. Please.

True mundane sexual incompatibility never seems to be addressed; it’s either love of the Gods or the Psychos. Not the well, that didn’t work, or that was kinda icky. And it would be nice if the girl could be turned off by the young stallion (not the balding letch) for indefinable reasons. And vice versa, ’cept that the girl not be a nerd or homicidal bitch.

In real life, with those married couples I have known who have sought marriage counseling, it wasn’t because of sexual incompatibility or infidelity. It was a problem in communication and connection. And those people looking for a mate, male or female, do not emphasize the sex. They are looking for an emotional or intellectual connection with a person they trust enough to have sex with. (Now, “couple logic”, that’s a rant for another day.)

I know and have known friends who would be typified as average, mainstream Americans clubbers, been in Greek Houses, and those who would be considered promiscuous, though they‘d have nothing on Phoebe or Joey. And I have known those who indulged in the lewd talk because that’s what you do, right? Right? As for the scandalous affair that is on everyone‘s lips? Well, if it were common, no one would talk about it, and usually it’s two years old when you hear about it.

Sex is indeed commonly thought to be a measure of success—but not sex alone. There are other qualifiers such as social position, intellectual merit, popularity, etc. I mean, your average hooker outdoes all of us, but no one puts her or him up on a pedestal and toasts their achievements.

We aren’t that straightforward about sex; we can’t frankly talk about it or the possible consequences. Not like adults anyway, we haven‘t moved much beyond a grade school mentality in many respects. Though of all of the three appetites I’m discussing, it is the one that we can literally live without in a way we can’t with Food or Sleep. So why is it the most important, and why am I going to end up spending the most words on it?

Hunger

The human relationship with food is even more perverse than sex and usually treated as pornographically, with similar moral restrictions. Let’s go back to Friends, shall we?

A motto that I grew up with was “Never trust a skinny cook.” What, then, are we to do with Monica Geller?

Skinny? She’s a starvation victim. It‘s not just that she doesn’t enjoy food, she’s clearly repulsed by it. Then there’s the Bizarro alternate universe where she is a fat smelly geek, reflecting her adolescent trouble with eating. But, that Monica always seemed more content and comfortable and trustworthy than the starved-crazed “real” Monica.

Most anxiety relates to food—not enough or too much. In a land when a sense of never-ending supply and overwhelming portions is the goal, those that show any honest evidence of indulgence are scorned and ridiculed. Show us famine victims in Africa and we shriek and throw food at them without thinking out how it will actually reach them. Our insanity around food knows no bounds.

Food neuroses and limits are usually brought up at some point. And usually ridiculed. And when the actual food does make an appearance on your average TV show, is it pleasure in the healthy foods, nourishing staples or comfort foods? Oh no. It’s the bad foods, the naughty, the elite foods: dark chocolate, lobster, devil’s food cake. Not a tuna sandwich, not Nutella, not red beans and rice, not even a simple candy bar or a glass of water, things people I know will really crave and feel better by.

But the real screwed up messages about food for me come from the commercials. Talk about conflicting messages and unrealistic measures of success. And the gender politics? Brrr. Yes, women can do it all: a career, motherhood, house-keeping, cook every meal while eating Jenny Craig, keeping herself safe from exposing the fact she‘s “on her period” and following Jenny Craig–all without pores! Whereas the men are generally too stupid to work a microwave and so have to resort to fast food. But that’s okay if they can figure out what beer to party with.

Sleep

Or, as I said, leisure. You can find dozens of articles on how screwed up Americans are about simply relaxing and doing nothing. Most instances I see on the sitcom is the ruined vacation or the prevention of sleep, funny because, well, do they really deserve this rest? Shouldn’t they be working or looking for fulfillment?

I actually would put drugs under this category rather than Sex—and alcohol as well, as opposed to Hunger. It’s all recreation, a change and an escape. All good. We actually need this for our all-over health—physically, emotionally and mentally.

It still cracks me up that in the dot com days, all these fringe alternative web jockeys put in 80 hour weeks for their Company. It was a striving for virtual money at the sacrifice of their health and well-being. And I thought that this was the Slacker generation…

And vacations aren’t vacations unless you are doing something—skiing, hiking, cancer research, whatever. And as for the weekends, when someone asks, “What did you do?” surely you cannot answer “sat on my ass the whole time, and, by God, I liked it!’

Conclusion

Let me just some up by saying there is no real conclusion, no new thoughts, theories or observances. We humans are screwed up into tight little balls over our base—as well as our higher—impulses. We check ourselves against the perceived norm and calculate who are our allies and who are not. As with any other human venture. This, as always, comes out in the most popular tales of the day.

In these stories, human nature and appetites are exaggerated and often lampooned. There is usually moral judgement and retribution appropriate to maintain the status quo. Excessive behavior will be often punished, but sometimes rewarded depending on the offender. And though these stories reflect the standards of the culture of where they are told, they never were a place to derive an accurate picture of everyday experience or beliefs.

We ended up as a group of about a dozen by the end, but no one unknown to Christopher except Mark and Elaine, who proved to be good sports when I had to cancel our tentative dinner plans with them last night and instead joined us at Mary’s (we had commited to Christopher first and simply forgot when discussing dinner and watching The Seven Samurai with them)

Mostly it was a gang of the usual suspects, including Kevin, Kip and Eric—Barry couldn’t make it, alas, he was working last night. Though I most certainly enjoyed the company I kept last night, I was disappointed that Barry could’t make it last night. Beyond the joy of his presence, I had met him at the end of the ’80s, when most of the comics we read seemed to have some scene or another in a strip club. The nostalgia value would have been interesting. Actually, I believe it was the late ’80s or very early ’90s that one of my favorite issues of Joe Sacco’s Yahoo was done, in which Sacco illustrated a script written by Susan Catherine detailing her experiences on the stripper circuit.

More…

So, yeah, good people, good conversations—though I often wasn’t looking at the person I was talking to, out of fear of being rude to the stripper on stage while she was performing. Now, the whole stripping thing was odd for me only because it all seemed so normal and inoffensive. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve gone to so many life drawing sessions at Hipbone that people taking off their clothes and presenting themselves has lost a lot of the thrill for me, or if it’s just that a moral circuit in my brain is broken. There are so many things that I just can’t get worked up over: porn, most sex acts between consenting adults, who’s doing whom, people who like 7th Heaven, and so on. Personally I save my rage for acts like rape, torture, racism, land mines in Iraq, not to mention corporate hanky-panky. And a certain Commander-in-Chief often gets my blood pressure up.
I found myself feeling perfectly comfortable at Mary’s Club. It probably

helped that there was a definite feeling that the strippers had some control of their enviroment. The crowd was all in all a good friendly one,  peppered with women beyond our group. Of course there was that one asshole who has to stand out with a swagger and macho talk. He was quickly dressed down by the stripper on stage who took his drink and sent him on his way. She was already my favorite, being as impressively limber and athletic as a gymnast and having done a routine to “Eleanor Rigby”. I mean, she wrapped her legs around the pole, hung upside down and took her top off, and she could keep one foot on the stage while touching the ceiling with the other (damn!). Turns out that she was the mother of our cocktail waitress. A family joint is Mary’s!

The only time I felt faintly uncomfortable was when one customer requested a table dance. This act took place off in a corner, half-hidden from the general club by a video poker machine. It wasn’t anything I saw happening, which was not any different then the act on stage. I think it was the fact that it was happening in a corner, half-hidden, that made it seem furtive and wrong though I know the only intent was discreet.

Or maybe I was reminded by a truly vile segment of Desmond Morris’s TV mini-series: The Human Sexes. He had just finished going on about how women body builders grossly deform their bodies. Cut from a female body building competition to an example of what Desmond deems the natural woman—a skimpily dressed big busted lass preforming a lap dance for some guy. I cannot even begin to describe my rage over this, all from a guy whose own figure more closely resembles the Venus of Willendorf than the presumed male ideal of Arnold Schwartznager.

But beyond that, my only discomfort came from the usual bar nonsense like cigarette smoke and some guy interupting the conversation Elaine and I were having to ask if either of us played pool—totally ignoring our husbands on either side of us. We lied about not knowing how and went back to talking and tipping the strippers.

I didn’t find it very sexual though. Not even tiltilating from the sense I was doing something naughty. Again, I’m don’t know if this stems from life drawing or what. Probably just not my thing, which I don’t believe is because I’m a woman. I know and have known woman who are aroused by this kind of display and not with that defiant “If men like it, I’m going to like it” attitude accompanied with either a mad glee or the look one gets before swallowing castor oil.

Stripping and porn in general are odd things with so much meaning and possible meaning for so many people. Some people are angry about it because it’s Wrong. Why it’s wrong splits off into many categories, from God doesn’t like it to it’s demeaning to women. But I don’t believe it is inherently demeaning and, let’s face it, all the clothes I ever owned and all the obscenity laws I lived under were man-made, not divinely requistioned.

I am not so naïve as to ignore the society and culture that we and Mary’s Club exist in. Of course along with sex comes power and the question of who has it— as Ani DiFranco states, “Any tool is a weapon, if you hold it right.” And though there are alternative venues featuring men- or women-only clubs, neither can shake the looming shadow of the forbear they’re a response to: the “Gentleman’s” Club, the Peepshow, 20 Nude Girls 20, XXX, Shag McNasties, and so on.

The first and only other strip joint I have ever been in was in Pittsburgh, where I was attending college—a totally different experience than Mary’s Club. In fact, it was the stereotypical Strip Club, with peepshow in the rear and adult book store attached, along with a sleazy atmosphere. Unlike Oregon, the strippers didn’t lose their thongs—which made it worse somehow. As Becca pointed out to when we discussed strip club experiences, declaring something obscene and then censoring it makes it seem even more obscene than the original thought.

And whereas I would never use my experiences or opinions to invalidate another person’s, the idea that strip clubs or porn incite violence or discrimination against women just doesn’t jive with me. Does it help? No. Nudity is vulnerabilty, vulnerability gives the appearance of a victim.

But I believe those who would harm another would do so regardless. I was molested by a couple of men growing up and I was shown porn to—I don’t know—get twelve-year-old me in the mood? But other adult men in my life then that I later found out read Penthouse would not only never have done that to me, but condemn the men who did.

I guess for me it’s like complaining about the color of the paint on a house while the foundation is crumbling. We are all taught, male and female, from very early on to appreciate a certain type of female ideal form and then our gender training veers off: males are taught that they should want her, females to be her. And just as the allegories of Justice and Liberty are represented by women, so is Sex, draped over cars or hawking electronics.

Really, Pornography just seems so much more honest somehow.

The epigram of the first chapter instantly brought back all of my I am fond of Laqueur’s book and analysis and why I keep this book around to refer to time and again:

The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are “the opposite sex” (though why “opposite” I do not know; what is the neighboring sex”?). But the fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world.

Dorothy L. Sayers “The Human-Not-Quite-Human”

Then we get to the good stuff, like historical accounts of maidens awaken from comas with “passionate embraces”, the pluses and minuses of the old belief that female orgasm was necessary for conception and, of course, inside-out penises. And that’s only the first chapter.